David Brooks – now with Ro-mentum!

October 25th, 2012, 10:30am by Sam Wang

It was fun to learn of David Brooks’s addiction to polling data. He spends countless hours on them, looking at aggregators, examining individual polls, and sniffing poll internals. From all of this, what has he learned?

Today, President Obama would be a bit more likely to win.

There seems to be a whiff of momentum toward Mitt Romney.

(Emphasis mine.)

I am having a sad. All of that effort, and his two conclusions still have two major errors. Evidently he does not read the Princeton Election Consortium. Let us dissect this.

1. President Obama would be a bit more likely to win. This is false – he’s a lot more likely to win. Look at the Princeton Election Consortium’s EV histogram, which tabulates all 2.3 quadrillion possible combinations of states to give a clear snapshot of the race:

In a race today, President Obama would win with about 90% probability. The true probability is even higher, since the Meta-Analysis does not correct for individual pollster errors. We could – but the political blowback from unskewing polls is too large.

2. There seems to be a whiff of momentum toward Mitt Romney. Ah, yes…Ro-mentum! Bobo has taken the bait. He is probably looking at other aggregators, where for various reasons (q: do you want me to write about that sometime?) the real trends are harder to see. Let’s roll the instant replay.

As you can see, Ro-mentum ended around October 11th, the date of the VP Biden-Ryan debate and reversed around October 16th, Debate #2. Now the median EV expectation is at a plateau around Obama 293 EV, Romney 245 EV. Viewed through the all-important Electoral College, Obama has a Popular Vote Meta-Margin lead of 1.5%. This measure is precise to within <0.5%, far better than any single poll. If anything, the race is starting to look a bit static.

Of course, some change may well happen over the coming 12 days. Based on past races (see “The Presidential Predictor sharpens,” Sept. 29), here is how much movement we can expect.

The “1 SD band” indicates the 1-sigma range for future Meta-Margin change. The election is 12 days away, over which we could expect movement of up to 1.4% in either direction – about equal to the current Meta-Margin. If drift were random, Romney’s chances of catching up would be 1 in 6 – the roll of a die.

But which way will things actually go?

The largest unknown factor that might help Romney is undecided voters. In national surveys ending on Oct. 23 or after, there are still 4.0 +/- 0.7 % undecideds (n=7). Based on past elections (“How will the last holdouts break?” 11/3/2008), undecideds break about equally, with a tiny advantage for the challenger. Romney can expect a net benefit of +0.3 +/- 0.8%. That benefit is a main contributor to the 1 in 6 chance I give him above. However, the uncertainty (0.8%) is larger than the average benefit (0.3%), so it could also hurt him.

Don’t be like David Brooks. Finally, a word on examining individual polls. In the comments section, I am seeing breathless statements like how the TIME poll shows Obama +5% in Ohio, and won’t that move the Meta-Margin, and so on. Hey…relax. In case you haven’t noticed, the Meta-Margin’s not moving that much. Try to avoid caressing those individual polls too much!

With that, I end with something in Brooks’s column that I did like:

If you do have to look at polls, you should do it no more than once every few days, to get a general sense of the state of the race.

That’s not bad advice. Instead, spend the time on GOTV in a swing district near you. Here they are.

Finally: in comments, I encourage you to avoid citing individual polls. Give it a try.

295 Comments so far ↓

Since the Denver debate, Mr. Obama has held the lead in 16 Ohio polls against 6 for Mr. Romney. In Nevada, Mr. Obama has had the lead in 11 polls, to Mr. Romney’s 1. Mr. Obama has led in all polls of Wisconsin since the Denver debate, and he has had five poll leads in Iowa to one for Mr. Romney.

Ras conducted OH polls on 10/17 and 10/23 that are up on Pollster. They shouldn’t have another one until 10/30. Gravis’s last poll was 10/18-19. They might show up. Or ARG, Pulse Opinion Research/Let Freedom Ring (R), WeAskAmerica, and Wenzel Strategies (R-Citizens United). They’re all Repub pollsters who did OH polls earlier this month.

It is a big mistake not to include 3rd party candidates when the election is this close. Only a handful of pulls show them. In some states, Johnson is polling 2%, mostly from the ‘undecided’ which seems to really be torn between ‘non-of-the-above’ and ‘you didn’t list my choice’ this year. In other states, Johnson pulls 5 or even 9%, mostly coming from Romney. What about these states where there is 2% margin. Is Johnson pulling from undecided, Obama or Romney? I think Sam is generous when he says the effect of the undecided could improve Romney as much as 0.3%. I think it is more like zero. Either they won’t vote or they’ll vote third party with about 1% breaking for either of the two main candidates.

NH didn’t change from 5pm to 8pm. It’s still R+1. I’ve started downloading the Power table into Excel so I can see which states’ medians change with each update. (I’m a 68-y.o. retired actuary with lots of time on my hands.)

Agree with those who’d rather see North Carolina [pink, last seen at R+3] listed in Power of Your Vote than, say, Michigan at O+6.
Actually, I’d rather see more states listed. Plenty of room in the margin.

Chill dude! Go find some interviews with “undecided” voters. (If you can’t find any, the Saturday Night Live parody is surely available, and is shockingly accurate.) There is absolutely no telling what these people “decide” on. Media narrative is as irrelevant as everything else.

And, DON’T “add up” Ohio. You’re doing it wrong. Let Sam do it for you. He knows what he’s doing.

I’m sorry to break this to you, NC, but the national trackers show a massive Romney surge today. He gained 0.35 since yesterday. News reports are coming in now stating that the lines of Romney voters in Ohio are so long that they’re stretching all the way to West Virginia, which is Ohio’s route to the sea ;)

I’m guessing the MM will drop in the 8pm update. With the flurry of polls showing up on Pollster.com early this evening, it looks like VA goes from O+1.0 to R+0.5 and NV from O+3 to O+2.5. A lot of the new state polls today seem (to me) to be Dem-leaning.

Meanwhile, I still don’t know what’s going on with NC. Its median should be based on only 2 or 3 polls: tie, O+3, R+6 — by PPP, Grove Insight (D), and Rasmussen. That’s a small and disparate group of pollsters.

RCP is so pissing me off. They are so manipulative. Was there not a PPP poll in VA O+5. They only show PPP polls in states where it helps their Romentum narrative. Don’t tell me they don’t use PPP polls because they do in states where it makes their case.

RCP doesn’t list anyone’s polls when they’re commissioned by a candidate or an interest group. As far as I can see they’re applying this rule equally across the board. I agree that it’s weird when it’s applied to PPP polls, though. Same pollster, apparently the same methodology, but some of the polls count and others don’t.

I was thinking of sending my kid to Princeton, but maybe not now, if they are churning out kids that come up with predictions like this site… well, you’re not as bad as the votamatic crew with the EV skew, but that first graph makes me chuckle.

OK though, I’ll stick around and see you guys through the election returns next week. It’ll be interesting to see how you deal with it.

At a good university, teachers will present factual information that sometimes challenges prior assumptions. The analysis here is based entirely on data. I hope you find a suitable place for your child’s education.

Lovely day when the mm goes your way, yes? From what I hear and read about the Obama ground game, they are running rings around Mitt in NV, OH, and VA. And this after the GOP was supposed to have caught up to the Democrats since 2008. Looks like the move back to Obama is happening right on schedule. Every day that the mm moves higher is a day that Romney has to work extra hard just to stay in place.

Guys…how do you think this will affect the race and Sam’s analysis…new Marist Poll showing Colorado tied and O with a 3 point edge in Nevada. Story makes a big deal that in Sept he held a 5 point lead in CO…Will this feel into Chucky T’s
“Romentum” mime?

Chris, NC should be tied. The Ras R+6 stays, since the model uses a minimum of three polls, no matter how stale they are. Although the PPP NC poll was up on Pollster in time for the 5pm update, it apparently hasn’t made it yet to the datastream that the model uses. I’ve seen this happen before a few times. It gives us something to look forward to tomorrow.

Thanks again, Froggy. I’m still learning about Dr. Wang’s methods. I’m surprised the PPP NC poll wasn’t in the 8pm update. And Nevada’s O+3 looks incorrect to me. There are only four polls in the last week, from what I see: O+4,O+3,O+2,O+2. Their median is O+2.5.

Chris, the model uses average polling dates (dropping fractions). The most recent NV poll is the Marist 10/23-24, which the model counts as 10/23. This means that the Mellman poll (10/15-17, O+8) is still being counted, since its average polling date is 10/16, and 10/16 is within a week of 10/23.

I think when a poll is that ridiculous it’s better to just not count it as it’s throwing off the #s … I suppose then you get into judgment calls… but come on, even in Michigan? from the same pollster that said Romney was up by 15% in Florida? it’s 100% BS.

Just click on VA in the Power of Your Vote table above and calculate the median of the last week’s polls. It was O+1.5 at 3pm and now it’s O+1 with the addition of JZ Analytics O+2 poll. Look, as new state polls appear and the one-week windows shift, those states’ medians are going to bounce around quite a bit, and the MM will, too. It’s better just to look at Dr. Wang’s chart of the MM over time, e.g., daily. It’s been slowly rising into the O+1.5/O+1.8 range for a few days now.

I think this election is good for punditry, or at least I am optimistic that it will prove good for punditry as a profession. Jim Fallows articulated the case very well in a recent blog post. We have a very real disagreement between the old guard pundits, like David Brooks, who base their arguments on intuition, conversations with insiders and other non quantitative measurements. On the otherside we have the new class of pundits, like Dr Wang, who are basing their arguments entirely on actual measurements of who is winning and a statistical analysis of those measurements. This isn’t the academy awards, after all. We do have an actual and very thorough measurement of who is winning. We also have a looming massive and completely through experiment of that measurement.

I not only hope that this divide remains through the election, I actually hope it becomes more accute. I want one side to be proven spatacularly wrong by the other in the hope that those proven wrong are discredited.

I saw the same article, and just started laughing. The article is written by Gary Langer, who also owns the polling company Langer Research, who conducted the poll.Talk about self serving BS. Anyways this site as been an outstanding educational tool for my children and myself.

National Polls are useless. We have that old Electoral Vote system. Here in Alabama Romney will likely take 88-90% of the vote but all votes above the one that gives him the state’s entire EV are useless, yet those are counted in the national polls. The only thing that counts now is actual turnout in swing states in early vote, election day, and absentees. Obama can be ahead by 30% in the polls but if those who prefer him don’t show up in force its hello President Romney. We must focus on the ground game, I suggest that for close elections this PEC method can be improved by estimating the resources input to and efficiency of the ground game…

Do people track that? If we now have American Crossroads spending $12 million on Ohio turnout and no Democrat counter, the Ohio poll and thus the PEC estimate is pretty much meaningless.

Ladies and gents, The talking heads and the print journalists all have deadlines and hope to get listened to/read. Thus they talk endlessly about insignificant things to fill air time/blank space. That’s their jobs just understand that and go on with your day..

I really enjoy refreshing the PEC tab to see what joys may appear. Thanks Sam.

What I am most impressed with, is that Dr Wang started the Ro-mentum schtick yesterday and now the MM is higher. I feel I should ask him what are the winning lottery numbers tomorrow. I also sent this site to family and friends who are political junkies like I am. It rules.

My read of that was that we wasn’t disagreeing with either conclusion- Romney definitely had some momentum after the 1st debate, but polls have flattened for him recently.
He seems a bit of a puss, but his conclusion seemed to be:
“Depends how you define momentum”

It seemed to me to lean pretty heavily towards Ro-mentum. I didn’t see that article noting anywhere that the polls have flattened recently. Every comparison seems to be between two points in time: immediately pre-debate #1 and now. And it concludes, “What we don’t [know] is whether Romney has peaked or not. But it’s tough to argue that there hasn’t been real movement toward him in the past three weeks. “

over at 538 the story is similar to what it is here… at 538 Romney peaked on October 12th… — and Obama was still the favorite at 56% in the Now Cast) — since then Obama has gained 18% points to his current 74% level.

If you look at the MM here you see that it dropped to it’s lowest point at about the same point and since then it has been climbing up for Obama.

It’s quite obvious that if anyone has momentum in this race it’s President Obama.

Chris Cillizza is a perfect snap shot of what the DC pundit class is thinking about a given subject at a given point in time. Whatever he’s saying is the group think of the moment one way or the other. Don’t hate the player hate the game.

Thanks, I think, to the folks above who mentioned Electoral Scoreboard and Pollyvote. Along with Desart and Holbrook, whom I read about yesterday on Votamatic, I now have an ever-growing stable of sites to visit to feed my election OCD.

Thank God this’ll be over in 12 days (unless it’s decisive-provisional-ballots time in Ohio, please God no…).

Pollster just put up the new MI poll, a tie, from FMWB (Foster McCollum White Baydoun ). MI will drop, I think, from O+7.5 to O+6 in the 5pm update. Read halfway down the page in the link below to see what Nate Silver thinks of this polling outfit:

Dr Wang has asked us to _try_ not talking abut individual polls. And what an easy day to do that. Beautiful numbers.
As of October 25, 3:00PM EDT:
Obama: 297
Romney: 241
Meta-margin: Obama +1.82%
It’s been proven that individual polls are nowhere near as accurate as PEC.
Cmon people!

The idea is that those people polled in June-September did not disappear – and at the time, they had an opinion. Therefore surveys from that period tell us something about the likely range of future opinion. In other words, the race will tend to move in the direction of where it’s been in the past. For a re-election race this is especially true.

Whenever Brooks makes comments like the ones Prof. Wang cited, it means he’s on a subject he doesn’t know a lot about. But he just had to get in on the subject because it’s popular now.

I love it when people like him boil all of the detailed work that experts like Prof. Wang do to “ah, looks like a close one, with the President a bit more likely to win”. That’s the type of thing you say before looking at any evidence at all. I would say this is one of Brooks’ mailed in columns.

Cousin works for a large media outlet. Does happen. She explained producers, for whatever reason, tell “journalists” to ignore one thing for another to give the story “legs”. Her words, not mine. I give what she says more credence, no offense.

I’ve also worked in a newsroom, and I think the manipulation of the story happens more on television (particularly cable news) than print or Internet. The need to keep viewers tuned in requires stories pushing tension and anticipation. Newspapers tend to give more in-depth coverage. Internet feeds ones beliefs: users typically go to websites that reinforce their established views.

Question: Anyone have a link to the exact page where Pollster.com lists its latest state-level and national polls? And latest polls of Senate and House races (without having to click on every single state)? I can’t seem to find them.

I see new CO and FL polls from a Democratic pollster that will move the MM. However, I’m not sure how I feel about including partisan polls from either side. In some ways I think RCP is right to exclude them. Surely no one thinks that these pollsters are above massaging the numbers or releasing only favorable polls. And yet they’re included in the pollster data base. I suppose that the argument would be that they cancel each other out, but crap canceling out crap doesn’t seem like a good way to go. For 2016, we need an accrediting agency for pollsters.

You don’t think Rasmussen is a partisan poll? It comprises 25%-35% of RCP poll numbers. It appears to consistently skew Republican by 2-4%. I’ve come to conclude that RCP is the Fox News-lite of polling sites.

Mark Blumenthal from Pollster.com and Andy Kohut from Pew appeared on the The Diane Rehm Show to talk about polling and made the point that so-called “partisan” polls, in their judgment, generally very accurate and conducted by professional pollsters with high standards. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have “house effects,” but their point was that parttisan polls shouldn’t be automatically discounted. I don’t know whether they are right or not, but they are both respected pollsters and thought you might be interested in their point of view.

Pollster believes that Gravis has a republican house effect and adjusts for that in their model. I am OK with pollsters that have an observed house effect – even though they may be partisan. Models can adjust for those if they wish – and readers can choose the models they want to follow.

I am looking at all the popular models now and love the MM because it is frequently updated and has a transparent algorithm. There is broad agreement among the models about swing state predictions with the exception of New Hampshire. We await more polls …

As a Democratic partisan, I am hoping that Florida will flip from Romney to Obama as the polls leave behind the effects of the debates and begin to incorporate Florida absentee and early voting results – the latter starting this weekend and continuing for a total of 96 hours in the more populated Florida counties.

I really like that this site just includes it all, with the assumption that biases will cancel out. This assumes an underlying equality of both error and tendency toward thumb-on-the-scale behavior across the partisan divide (if it exists), which may or may not be true (there does seem to be a proliferation of low quality, high volume right-leaning pollsters – which RCP seems like it really wants to include, stated rules be darned).

However, as a scientist myself, I’m pretty hesitant about throwing out data. If the MM was literally hugging the 50/50 line for months, and I felt that some clarity might come out of seeing the results of only what I maybe even subjectively felt to be higher quality data, yeah, I’d want to start sifting even if it was just dinking around in R to see what it’d do. Right now though, I’m reassured that the bias I’d assume may be in the system is counter to what I’d hope actually occurs (An Obama win is being indicated, despite my worry that there may be a higher degree of partisan polling on the right). That seems less scary to me than the always lurking problem of confirmation bias if we start trying to pick and choose.

There’s a new PPP poll on Pollster that has NC tied. Its mid-date is 10/24, so it will knock off 2 0r 3 of the Romney-favored polls in the 5 pm update. NC will then be either tied or O+1.5, and the MM will rise again, EEBE.